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[...] Grit literature also reassures the desperate and frustrated that their situation is still within their control: a few tweaks or a new attitude are all you need to triumph in a job you love. One can imagine, however, how the payoff of such a philosophy could be pointless when it is not cruel. [...] In neither case is there anything different you could now do about it. In other words, grit offers an explanation for what exists rather than giving us the tools to imagine something different.
[...] defying the odds is, by definition, improbable. And while it may work as advice in a business world predicated on competition, to fashion a democratic educational policy around the possibility of defying odds makes little sense. If everyone, or even many people, could defy the odds, then casinos would be bankrupt.
on charter schools based on the idea of grit
[...] Another advantage to employers of treating education or health care as human capital development is that risk in labor markets can be outsourced to employees. Why train someone on the job when they might just leave and take their knowledge elsewhere? Why spend time and money teaching skills that may prove obsolete sooner than you think? And why pay into the health insurance of workers who insist on eating too much junk food on the weekend? Instead, let employees pay for their own college credentials and pursue their own wellness plan. The ideology of human capital asks one to think of nearly every form of social existence in terms of an actuarial calculation.
[...] As Young himself wrote in a 2001 essay deploring his term's enthusiastic adoption by the New Labour government of Tony Blair, that education had become a means of concentrating power. "It is good sense," he wrote, "to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." In short, Blair had missed the point of meritocracy, embracing the ideal of "merit" while forgetting the "aristocracy" part.
[...] NAFTA and American agribusiness are treated not as political circumstances but as metaphorical storms: since "we cannot control the volatile tides of change," they write," we can learn to build better boats." These examples are all part of a long tradition of naturalizing our contemporary political and economic order, treating food shortages and layoffs as if they are acts of nature that can never change. Resilience, once a property of the environment, has become a property of people. And those most vulnerable to the environmental shocks associated with modern capitalism are also responsible for becoming more resilient against them.
If the technology behind the sharing economy is not the source of its dominance, though, what is? "Financialization" may be the most relevant answer. "Finance, at its most basic level," writes the cultural critic Alison Shonkwiler, "is the domain in which value is less likely to be produced than captured and/or extraction, typically by managing a degree of risk." The "financialization" of the ecconomy is the orientation of capital accumulation (i.e., making money from the labor of others) around this extraction of value. Shonkwiler, following critics like David Harvey, argues that financialization is what is really new about the economy of the turn of hte twenty-first century. In the sharing economy, neither homes nor technologies are produced; instead, rents are extracted from assets owned by others. [...]
i like this, very clear
The growth of growth requires a different kind of person, one whose abilities, skills, emotions, and even sleep schedule are in sync with their role in the economy. We hear a sweetened version of this fact whenever politicians talk about preparing young people for the twenty-first-century labor market, and a slightly more sinister version from police officers and guidance counselors when they talk about working hard, flying right, and not making mistakes. It’s tough love, and young Americans are getting it from all sides. This advice is uncontroversial on its face, but its implications are profound. In order to fully recognize the scope of these changes, we need to think about young people the way industry and the government already do: as investments, productive machinery, “human capital.” If people have changed as much as other engines of productivity have over the past three or four decades, it’s no wonder the generation gap is so significant.
A hard look at these trends suggests that Millennials represent the demographic territory where a serious confrontation has already begun: a battle to see if America’s tiny elite will maintain the social control they require to balance on their perch. It’s not an arrangement they’ll let go of without a fight, and they have a lot of guns—figurative and literal. Political reforms seem beside the point if the next generation’s hearts and minds are already bought and sold. Millennials have been trained to hold sacred our individual right to compete, and any collective resilience strategy that doesn’t take that into account is ill-conceived, no matter how long and glorious its history. A regular old political party with a social media presence is insufficient on its face. No one seems to know what we—with all our historical baggage—can do to change our future.
This sort of intensive training isn’t just for the children of intellectuals; the theory behind the rhetoric advocating universal college attendance is that any and all kids should aspire to this level of work. College admissions have become the focus not only of secondary schooling but of contemporary American childhood writ large. The sad truth, however, is that college admission is designed to separate young adults from each other, not to validate hard work. A jump in the number of students with Harvard-caliber skills doesn’t have a corresponding effect on the size of the school’s freshman class. Instead, it allows universities to become even more selective and to raise prices, to populate their schools with rich kids and geniuses on scholarships. This is the central problem with an education system designed to create the most human capital possible: An en masse increase in ability within a competitive system doesn’t advantage all individuals. Instead, more competition weakens each individual’s bargaining position within the larger structure. The White House’s own 2014 report on increasing college opportunity for low-income students noted, “Colleges have grown more competitive, restricting access. While the number of applicants to four-year colleges and universities has doubled since the early 1970s, available slots have changed little.”15 Still, the Obama administration remained undaunted and continued to champion universal college enrollment, as if we even had the facilities to handle that.
[...] In a culture that increasingly rewards only exceptional accomplishment, any disadvantage or challenge can seem like a disqualification. One mom told Francis that because she had expected her son to star on the football team, his ADD diagnosis made her feel the way a parent who had expected a “normal” child must feel upon hearing a diagnosis of Down syndrome.30 It’s an insensitive comparison, but there’s something revealing in the equation: A hypercompetitive environment sets parents up for dreams of champion children, and then for almost inevitable heartbreak. Millennials of all abilities have grown up in the shadow of these expectations, expectations that by definition only a very few of us can fulfill.